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January 2011
Full Signal Path Solution for Portable Ultrasound Systems
By Suresh Ram, National Semiconductor Corporation There is a rising demand for accessible medical care. The world population is rapidly growing and aging, increasing the cost of healthcare. Medical practitioners need small energy efficient and cost effective diagnostic devices.
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November 2010
Designing a Robust Failure Indicator
By Chris Keeser, Cypress Semiconductor Corp.
The other day I was driving to the local dump to drop off a load of trash carefully stacked into the back of the family minivan. Suddenly I noticed that the “trunk open” light came on.
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August 2010
Serial RapidIO Gen 2 in Next-Generation Wireless Base Stations
By Stephane Gagnon, IDT
Third- and fourth-generation wireless base stations that use today’s most-common interface standards, such as WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, LTE, TD-LTE and Wimax, require a large amount of signal processing to keep up with the uplink and downlink bandwidth requirements.
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April 2010
Bluetooth Low Energy – Not Just Another Radio Frequency Networking Protocol
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is fast-becoming the hottest buzz-word in low-power wireless communications. Within five years, we have seen a variety of standard and proprietary networking protocols emerge, begin to show promise, and occasionally open up new market spaces and fundamental opportunities for technical innovation. Is BLE just another low-power radio frequency (RF) networking protocol or something new to get excited about?
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The Emergence of JESD204A in Data Converters and Low Power FPGAs in Wireless Infrastructure Equipment
The increasing data throughput demands on base stations have led to increased radio unit component cost and power, with associated printed circuit board and interface complexities, as well as heightened signal integrity concerns.
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February 2010
Building an FPGA-based SoC Framework for LTE Baseband Designs
Radio Access Networks (RANs) are undergoing an architecture change to an all-IP flat network to reduce network deployment costs as well as to offer rich mobile applications and services at a lower end-to-end latency.
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LTE: The Insatiable Need for Bandwidth Drives Architectural Change
The baseband processing function represents a key area of product differentiation for Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs). However, the advent of 3.9/4G systems poses a difficult challenge to TEMs, as they struggle to evolve traditional DSP-centric channel cards to meet a new set of technical and commercial challenges.
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Transmitter RFIC Integration for Next Generation Wireless Infrastructure Radios
The migration to 3G and LTE Advance for the next generation of mobile communications infrastructure equipment provides many challenges for the equipment and component suppliers.
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October 2009
Build Agility through Wireless Networks Designed Right
Designing a wireless data network without fully accounting for the mix of applications, the types of client devices and number of users risks reduced performance.
By Dr. Roger Skidmore, Motorola
click to enlarge
Figure 1.
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Designing a Wireless Heart Rate Monitor with Remote Data Logging
Important improvements in Human-to-Machine Interface (HMI) functionality have been made possible by continuing advancements in Machine-to-Machine interfaces in terms of increased baud rate, low power consumption and reach (distance) of communication.
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State-of-the-Art IC: Transmitter in Ultrasound Devices
The medical imaging field is benefiting greatly from research and development in applied physics and electronics, especially in areas such as instrumentation, image acquisition and modeling.
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June 2009
Simultaneous Multimode RRH Design Made Easy
The diverse modulation formats and sampling rates between standards such as MC-GSM, WCDMA, and LTE make designing common building blocks, including digital upconverters (DUCs) and digital downconverters (DDCs), challenging.
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March 2009
Designing Handsets with Modularity
ith worldwide shipments of 990 million units in 2006 and in excess of 1.1 billion units in 2007 (source: iSuppli), mobile handsets have rapidly become the most dominant consumer electronics device in the market today.
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February 2009
Low Cost FPGA-Based HD/SD SDI Transceivers
As the explosion of HDTV, IPTV, VoD and YouTube downloads continues, together with the increased capabilities and falling prices of FPGAs, it is inevitable that the two technologies will intertwine.
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January 2009
F-RAM Moves to Automotive Infotainment Applications
The use of non-volatile ferroelectric RAM (F-RAM) in automotive applications began with airbag applications. This type of safety critical application was particularly well suited to F-RAM's high endurance.
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December 2008
Using Next-Generation Non-Stationary Noise Suppression to Enhance Voice Quality
Higher voice quality in noisy environments through next-generation noise suppression technology is proving to be one of the key differentiators for handset manufacturers and service providers.
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November 2008
Choosing an Infrared Receiver Based on AGC Type
Until recently, most light bulbs used for domestic lighting in the United States were incandescent. While Asia and Europe have largely switched to fluorescent lighting, Americans have been slow to adopt compact fluorescent lights (CFLs).
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Does Miniaturization Really Matter?
Limitations placed on which switch can be used due to its size, often exclude the option of using the "right" switch with the most advanced technology.
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Mobile Phone Growth Drives Need for Security, Enhanced User Functionality via Fingerprint Sensors
More than 10 million cell phones today integrate tiny semiconductor-based fingerprint sensors to provide an additional level of security, safeguarding the phone from unauthorized use if the device is lost or stolen.
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The Peripheral Value of Bluetooth Low Energy Wireless Technology (Part 2 of 2)
Initial applications for Bluetooth low energy wireless technology include leisure, healthcare, entertainment and office.
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October 2008
IR RECEIVERS
Until recently, most light bulbs used for domestic lighting in the United States were incandescent. While Asia and Europe have largely switched to fluorescent lighting, Americans have been slow to adopt compact fluorescent lights (CFLs).
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The Peripheral Value of Bluetooth Low Energy Wireless Technology Part 1 of 2
By the end of 2007, cumulative shipments of Bluetooth® technology reached around 1.75 billion with 800 million shipping in that year alone. And according to US analysts IC Insights, the short-range 2.4 GHz wireless technology’s growth is going to do anything but slow down.
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September 2008
Assessing the IC Issues & Challenges Facing 4G Base Station Architects
Over the next five years, the wireless industry will confront a perfect storm of technical and economic challenges as it attempts to bring the benefits of fourth generation (4G) wireless technology to users around the world.
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August 2008
Harnessing the Benefits of Adaptive RF Tuning
While today’s portable wireless devices embody dizzying arrays of features and capabilities, they still are beholden to the basics of RF transmission theory. The paradigm is essentially the same as sticking a set of rabbit ears atop a 50” plasma HD television, because the antenna ends up being the limiting element.
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How FPGA Trends Impact Wireless Infrastructure Design Organizations
With the introduction of 40 nm field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), the design domains of wireless infrastructure electronics that can be addressed with programmable logic devices (PLDs) are growing (see Figure 1).
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June 2008
Classic Discrete Design Skills Are Making a Comeback
Modern CMOS processes that enable integration of both logic and RF functionality are commonly used in the design of transceiver circuits for wireless devices. While logic and radio functions benefit from the integration possibilities, high-Q, high precision passive elements often used for impedance matching and frequency selectivity are usually left outside the chip in the form of discrete elements or filter circuits.
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May 2008
Designing a Cost-effective, High-performance Digital Audio Development Board
Most DSP development hardware targeting digital audio signal processing applications is designed with the primary consideration given to performance, but minimal consideration given to the cost of the board. The result is a robust development system that can cost $1000 (USD) or more for hardware alone.
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March 2008
Selecting a Suitable RFIC Amplifier
There are many RFIC amplifiers available on the market, often categorized by the process they are made on, ranging from low cost silicon parts with wideband internally matched inputs to low noise gallium-arsenide parts with high linearity. Some parts are only DC tested while others are 100% RF tested by the manufacturer. Normally the guaranteed specification (min and max) will indicate which parameters are tested in production. While there are seemingly straightforward specifications given in the datasheets, the unwary should look out for one or two potential pitfalls.
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January 2008
Crest Factor Reduction for OFDM-based Wireless Systems
When efficiently implemented, the CFR algorithm using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), results in a low latency, high performance design that significantly reduces the PAR of the output signal while being standards compliant, leading to improved power amplifier efficiency and reduced cost.
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December 2007
Boosting Bluetooth to 250 Mb/s with Ultra-Wideband
Upgrading to high-speed Bluetooth looks deceptively simple. However, even with the addition of UWB, device performance can still be limited by the internal system.
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Integrated EMI Filters and the Need for More Bandwidth
Using an Elliptical type filter topology has many advantages over a simple LC filter such as a Bessel or Tchebyshev topology.
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November 2007
Integrating an RF transceiver into a Cellular-Enabled Product Has Never Been Easier
The time to develop new phones is increasingly gated by software development, not hardware development. Simplifying phone software development tasks as much as possible and building in standards compliance can help improve time-to-market, ease the overall burden of integrating a new transceiver and increase the chances that a new customer could easily integrate an RF transceiver into a cellular-enabled product.
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Practical Design Considerations — Ethernet versus RapidIO
Many times, engineers are so good at what they do that they are able to carry technology over to applications for which it was never intended. In some cases, the fit is "good enough", and the resulting economies of scale are sufficient to make the extended implementation of the technology successful. In other cases, however, the desire of a familiar technology leads engineers to "shoe-horn" it into new applications which stretches the technology beyond its capabilities, unnecessarily complicating design by creating more problems that need to be solved.
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October 2007
Trying on RF Amplifiers Get the Right Fit
Increasingly, amplifiers dominate the cost and overall system specifications making the selection of the right amplifier for a particular application more critical than ever.
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September 2007
Using Customizable Microcontrollers to Beef up Performance and Cut Power Drain
MPCF technology is being used in existing MCUs with SoC-level integration to create a customizable SoC platform, with the same low unit prices of cell-based ASICs.
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Wide-Bandwidth Video Switch Matrix/Drivers and Transmission Technology in Consumer Electronics
The continuous demand of more features in car cabinet music/display system continues to drive the fast adoption of the high performance analog products for either signal transmission/conditioning or analog front/back end routing.
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January 2007
Improving RF performance in Mixed-signal Circuits
Satellite applications using advanced CMOS technology for devices throughout the signal chain benefit from double the capacity, higher integration and lower power consumption...
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Integrating Functions on Mixed-Signal SoCs
System complexity, escalating cost pressures, shrinking available silicon and more restrictive quality requirements are among the increasing demands placed on ASIC designers.
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Technology Trends Supporting Millimeter-Wave MMIC Product Development
Established and emerging markets such as point-to-point radio and satellite communication systems pose significant challenges to existing GaAs millimeter wave MMIC technologies.
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